Slack, Hubot, and Webhooks: Custom Notifications Using All Three

Choosy devs choose Slack. It’s dev tested, mother approved. Slack has become the main source of our team collaboration.

One of the benefits of Slack is the sheer number of pre-built integrations. There’s integrations for GitHub, Raygun, and all sorts of stuff. These work great! But, sometimes you need a special custom notification.

For these custom notifications, we’ve found that creating custom scripts for our Hubot instance fills the gap.

Our Hubot and custom scripts

Hubot is a chat bot created by GitHub that can work with various chat networks. There are adapters for HipChat, Slack, etc. Hubot can be great for all sorts of fun – but it can be a platform for Serious Business ™, too.

As a team, we’ve used Hubot in the past with non-Slack chat networks. However, since we’ve moved to Slack, we’ve re-discovered some of its usefulness. In that regard, we’ve created some Hubot scripts that are available on the https://www.npmjs.com/ public registry.